View Your Productivity Through the Lens of Values and Priorities
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Sep 14, 2025
Discover the power of thought experiments to clarify your true priorities and values. Engage in a '5% exercise' to sift through your to-do list and identify what truly matters. Experience an 'abundance exercise' to reveal your core values in a state of autonomy. Delve deeper to challenge surface-level responses, uncovering unique insights that guide your decisions. Finally, learn how aligning your daily actions with these values can lead to a more fulfilling career and life.
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Reveal Real Priorities With Scarcity
The 5% thought experiment forces you to reveal true priorities by imposing scarcity on your to-do list.
Scarcity shows your lived priorities, not aspirational ones, so choose the tiniest slice that exposes what you actually value.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Use Completion To Discover Values
After imagining you finish all obligations, ask what you'd do next to surface your core values and autonomy.
Be exhaustive in answers and push past culturally safe responses to find values that genuinely guide decisions.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Push Past Obvious Value Answers
Avoid settling for obvious, culturally normative values; keep listing until an answer surprises you.
Use surprising or unique values to better guide decisions rather than defaulting to common answers like "family."
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In this episode, we introduce two fundamental thought experiments to help you uncover your true priorities and core values. By exploring scenarios of scarcity and abundance, you'll learn to align your daily actions with what truly matters, leading to a more satisfied career and life.
Uncover Your Priorities: Engage in a "5% exercise" where you imagine only being able to complete a tiny fraction of your to-do list. This thought experiment leverages a scarcity mindset to reveal your genuine priorities, helping you distinguish between what you perceive as important and what truly is.
Discover Your Values: Participate in an "abundance exercise" by imagining all your obligations are met and you have complete autonomy. What you choose to do next in this state reflects your core values and helps you move beyond aspirational or culturally normative answers.
Go Deeper: Learn to challenge superficial answers when identifying your values, pushing beyond the obvious to find unique and potentially surprising insights that genuinely guide your decision-making.
Unify for Satisfaction: Explore the profound insight that the most likely path to a satisfied career and life comes from unifying your priorities and values, thereby avoiding actions that don't align with what truly matters to you.
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